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IPO Accounting

Getting ready for an IPO with the right IPO accounting software

For thriving businesses, the initial public offering (IPO) is a major milestone that gives your company a capital infusion—as well as a far greater degree of financial scrutiny from auditors, regulators, and investors. In most respects, the burdens of reporting, processes, and financial controls fall on the shoulders of the CFO, controller, and the rest of the finance team. And those responsibilities begin well before the watershed date when shares trade for the first time.

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For most executives, the IPO represents the culmination of a long, successful journey from start-up to market-proven success. But preparing for the IPO is generally one of the most challenging processes a business leader can undertake. The large, daunting volume of challenging financial preparations can leave many finance leaders unsure where to start.

The best place to begin is with your financial system. Smart pre-IPO firms start to use a modern, IPO accounting system at least 12-36 months before the planned IPO. Entry-level accounting software like QuickBooks may have been valuable during the early months as a small company—and perhaps could even stretch to handle a few elements of the IPO process. But it’s absolutely infeasible to build a corporate IPO process on QuickBooks.

Similarly, you can’t afford to rely on outdated and inflexible legacy financial systems that lack the features and reporting capabilities you need as a publicly traded company. You don’t want to tie up your finance team wasting valuable time managing all the reporting and analysis work that an IPO requires—and that your legacy system is incapable of handling. A dynamic, cloud-based IPO accounting system ensures that you, your team, and your system are ready to handle the rigors of the IPO process and keep your staffing level low as you prepare to go public.

When considering an IPO accounting system, consider Intacct—the only accounting solution preferred by the AICPA. Contact us today to learn more.

We went looking for a financial management system that could scale with us from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and Intacct was the clear choice. We evaluated several other options, but we saw in Intacct a best-in-class financial management system that we could grow with over time.